f some green
meadow at the other side of the world.

His way would lie along the old Spanish road--the Camino Real of popular
speech--the only remaining vestige of a fact and name left by that
royalty old Giorgio Viola hated, and whose very shadow had departed from
the land; for the big equestrian statue of Charles IV. at the entrance
of the Alameda, towering white against the trees, was only known to the
folk from the country and to the beggars of the town that slept on the
steps around the pedestal, as the Horse of Stone. The other Carlos,
turning off to the left with a rapid clatter of hoofs on the disjointed
pavement--Don Carlos Gould, in his English clothes, looked as
incongruous, but much more at home than the kingly cavalier reining in
his steed on the pedestal above the sleeping leperos, with his marble
arm raised towards the marble rim of a plumed hat.

The weather-stained effigy of the mounted king, with its vague
suggestion of a saluting gesture, seemed to present an inscrutable
breast to the political changes which had robbed it of its very name;
but neither did the other horseman, well known to the people, keen and
alive on his well-shaped, slate-coloured beast with a white eye, wear
his heart on the sleeve of his English coat. His mind preserved its
steady poise as if sheltered in the passionless stability of private
and public decencies at home in Europe. He accepted with a like calm the
shocking manner in which the Sulaco ladies smothered their faces with
pearl powder till they looked like white plaster casts with beautiful
living eyes, the peculiar gossip of the town, and the continuous
political changes, the constant "saving of the country," which to his
wife seemed a puerile and bloodthirsty game of murder and rapine played
with terrible earnestness by depraved children. In the early days of
her Costaguana life, the little lady used to clench her hands with
exasperation at not being able to take the public affairs of the country
as seriously as the incidental atrocity of methods deserved. She saw in
them a comedy of naive pretences, but hardly anything genuine except
her own appalled indignation. Charles, very quiet and twisting his long
moustaches, would decline to discuss them at all. Once, however, he
observed to her gently--

"My dear, you seem to forget that I was born here." These few words made
her pause as if they had been a sudden revelation. Perhaps the mere
fact of being born in the coun